Tony Beaver went to Goldsmiths’ College in the mid-Eighties, just before Damien Hirst and his contemporaries where he was taught by Brit-art mentor Michael Craig Martin. He completed his MA in Barcelona and has been shortlisted for the Garrick Milne Prize, The Celeste Prize and The Discerning Eye.

He paints, ‘lowly things’. Potatoes, pots, guinea pigs. “The way you paint potatoes changes with time, so they become self-portraits of where one is in one’s life. I think if you were to paint a potato every day for the rest of your life, some would be about death, some would be about children, some would be about doubt, some would be about celebration.”

He paints British comedians; Tommy Cooper and Kenneth Williams. “I think of them as archetypes of ways of being men. I want the paintings to be about a way of being a man, that is unusual and admirable, and to do with not-obvious qualities… Kenneth Williams represents a whole huge chunk of a type of Britain. He’s a national treasure. And yet he was a very brittle personality and misunderstood and difficult and like a hedgehog, very defensive.”

He paints water. “I did a series of paintings of water because I wanted people to look at it and wonder how it had been done, like a magic trick. Painting is like a magic trick, and it’s also alchemy. It’s changing oil paint into water.”

“I try new subjects all the time, but I look for a subject that has legs and that you can do again and again and get deeper into.”